15 months update

Miracle Baby is 15 months old now.

Sometimes it seems years ago that she was born and sometimes she does something so baby-ish and I think "relax, she's not going off to college just yet!"

QUIRKS: She has a funny new happy dance which looks like marching in place really fast. Cutest thing ever. She likes to sing EIEIO all day long over and over. In her carseat she dances by swinging her top half from left to right and kicking her legs. She LOVES dogs, but mostly to look at, not pet. She loves to wear grownup shoes and try to walk in them. She has recently gotten to where she can play by herself for long periods if it's something engrossing, so I can cook dinner or whatever next to her, which is really freeing.

THE 2 MOMMY THING: We have been surprised by how much preference she has shown for me (the bio mom). It actually only surfaced a few months ago but it just gets stronger and stronger. This has caused my wife, and therefore me, much angst. She believes it's the result of nursing, but I think it would have happened anyway. We have consulted other 2 mommy families, books, and even the pediatrician, and all said this was normal, innate, and temporary. But it doesn't make the "rejected" parent feel much better. I know how much it would kill me if I was DW. We do our best not to indulge it. When I hand her off, screaming, to my DW, I play it cool and do a brief happy goodbye and then walk away not looking back. We are working on getting her and DW more alone time together. But it just so happens that DW works odd hours and I am alone with the baby a lot, which doesn't help with attachment issues. One downside is that she is literally on my hip a lot (or in a soft structured carrier on my belly) and I get to where I need my space at the end of the day. I get more exposure to the toddler tantrums and attitude, and eventually my patience wears thinner than DW's. And it also aggravates my lifelong back issues. So DW and I look forward to the end of this phase. Have you experienced it?

WORDS: MB has always been funny with language. She talks a lot but it's mostly babble and words she says once and never again. If the pediatrician asked me how many words she says regularly it would be.... mama, baby and eat. But that doesn't represent how much she talks!

TOYS: She is a huge lover of dolls and stuffed animals, which surprises me because I wasn't. She always has to have something to cuddle with in her arms. Recently she decided she no longer wanted to play with toys in the car, but to veg out and listen to kids music and just have down time. So we respect that.

SLEEP: We have been moving her bedtime closer to 8pm so she won't wake up at 5am anymore. It's helping. Today she woke up at 6:40 which seems like a miracle.

TEETHING: She's been cutting her top molars which is just as bad as everyone always said it was.  All the teething advice ever given to me is useless on MB. She refuses to use any teething ring, frozen washcloth, frozen bagel, etc. Basically we just suffer through it, although she did do a lot of comfort nursing the past few days.

NURSING: On that note I am proud to say we are still nursing, usually upon wakeup and when I get off work at 5. We share a car (and have since 2008), so MB and my wife pick me  up at work and we nurse in the parking lot. She has only been on one 24 hour nursing strike, which about scared me to death! Other times, especially weekends, she nurses much more than twice. I hope to go till her second birthday because she needs all the nutritional benefits so much this year. One reason is that she refuses to drink cow's milk (or any milk except with chocolate in it, which we vetoed), which means she needs the fat, protein, and other nutrients she would have gotten from that.

FOOD/NUTRITION: Food and nutrition have been something I've put a lot of time, thought and energy into since MB started solids.

I planned to never be one of those moms with a picky eater who ends up feeding the kid nuggets and mac and cheese because "it's all he'll eat!" Joke's on me because I do have a picky eater, despite my dutiful attempts to offer her a wide variety of healthy foods the minute she ate solids. But I'm not giving up this battle yet! I found a huge resource in weelicious.com. She taught me to chop veggies and other healthy stuff into smoothies, muffins and pancakes, and now I always have some of those on hand for MB. She eats a vegetable muffin pretty much daily. Right now it's spinach, sweet potato and strawberry muffins. She loves them. I make them with whole wheat flour and very little sugar. You can sweeten them with vanilla and spices without adding sugar, so they still love them!

One challenge with MB has always been that what she loves one day she REFUSES the next. So we buy her "staples" and then they go to waste. It's very frustrating. She loved spaghetti for a while so I made her homemade veggie packed tomato sauce and now she refuses that. Etc etc. Some days it's exhausting trying to outsmart a picky toddler and make sure healthy stuff gets down her gullet. But I keep at it.

I have tried very hard never to push her to eat when she is not hungry. My family has a history of weight issues and I'm trying hard to help her have a healthy relationship with food. So we taught her a sign for "all done" and when she uses it, we respect that, although sometimes it feels like she is living on air!

She is 21 lbs, the same since 12 months old. She has been around the 50-60 percentile for a long time and I think has now fallen below that, but I am trying not to worry because I've been told kids this age really slow down with the weight gain, and I've been told kids won't starve themselves.

This is super long so I'll update more later!

Blog Status

Hi Everybody,

Sorry that I haven't written for 3 months. It wasn't that I was too busy. It's that I have been thinking a lot about blog privacy ever since my family was so thoroughly attacked through this blog during our adoption attempt. Every year it seems the internet gets less and less private, including on "the debil," and I know I will need to answer to MB one day about what I posted about her online.

I have loved this blog and this community and I hate letting it go, hence 3 months of indecision. At one point I decided to end the blog after MB was born, but it's been 15 months now and I haven't yet. I don't want to lose all you wonderful people but I want to avoid all the crazies out there, so I'll keep thinking on it.

I may delete all past posts/pics and make this blog text only (boring, I know).
I may delete the blog altogether.
I may figure out how to do a password protected blog, which I think I cannot do in Blogger?
I'm sure all mommy bloggers struggle with this, so your thoughts are appreciated! Thanks, and happy holidays,

C